Family/Family exhibition at Le Château d’Eau

The four artists
united around the title Family, Family, are from four European countries, all
photographing the private and using the family as their field of research. However, far from the family
album, which outlines the important moments in life, they shine a light on the minor details in the
everyday, thus rendering these supposedly private images universal. The I becomes we and everyone, in the
same way as Katherine Mansfield, shows with delicacy and subtlety the modest side of existence.

Firelight

Playing
in the fire and twilight together,My little son and I,Suddenly--woefully--I
stoop to catch him.«Try, mother, try!»Old
Nurse Silence lifts a silent finger:«Hush! cease your play!»What happened? What in that tiny momentFlew away?

Katherine
Mansfield

Ed Alcock, Hobbledehoy

Ed
Alcock is a British photographer living in Paris.

‘My father used to call me a
hobbledehoy. He had a rhyme that he used to half-sing-half-speak, “he was neither man, nor boy; he was but a
hobbledehoy”. The word has been used in our family for generations, and has its origin in Old English. It
usually describes a male child in that awkward phase between childhood and manhood.

There
is something in the way my son holds himself in these photographs, and in the forlorn nature of his gaze
that makes me think of an older child, already nostalgic for his childhood. Of course, I’m projecting my own
feelings about that period. So who is this hobbledehoy : my son, myself or both of us? Ed Alcock

‘I
want to document the fragments, the inner visions. Images that haunt and save. Hands carrying fava beans as
corpses. An image as a whisper. Timelessness as the measure. Fictional and self experienced.’ Extract from
Cahier N°1

Ilka Kramer was born 1969 in
Germany, She lives and works in Switzerland

Behind the house shows children in their
approach to nature, according to their imagination and fascination of fairytales. Behind the house, far away
from the life of adults, the garden and the fields become large spaces to explore. In timeless moments, the
children get taken away in their own stories, facing nature which is full of beauty and generosity, but also
hostility and permanent transformation. All are staged photographies, inspired by the observation of the
children and the souvenirs of my own childhood.

‘They already want to run away, everything is in
this literary title, setting the scene of a story which is taking place. The photographer, stands apart,
watching the characters who populate his private life, this so enigmatic elles (the
feminine ‘they’ in French) leads us into a story filled with feminine diversity.’ Léa Bismuth